«Animation is closest to poetry»

Psychologies : How do ideas for your films come about?

Svetlana Filippova : I’ll tell you a story. I studied at the department of directors-animators at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors. Yuri Borisovich Norshtein gave us a task — to come up with the awakening of a person and show his character through details. He left us in the auditorium for two hours. I remember looking out the window, it was snowing. And I thought: how beautiful it is for us, the observers, and how hard it is for the janitors. I drew a storyboard about a janitor who sleeps with a shovel under a blanket and in clothes. Like a warrior, always ready to fight the snow. It was my first storyboard that I showed Norshtein. I drew it clumsily and was embarrassed to approach his table. I thought: now he will kick me out for incompetence. And suddenly Yuri Borisovich burst out laughing. Something seemed funny to him in this janitor with a shovel. From this episode, the film «Sarah’s Tale» later grew.

In this amazing film, the world is shown through the eyes of a child. Does observing your children help you at work?

S. F. : «Sarah’s Tale» would not exist if the children did not appear. It so happened that they were born immediately after I graduated from the Higher Directing Courses. Filming had to be delayed for several years. I raised children and watched. In her free time, she painted scenes from a future film. He didn’t fit in at all. The end was too expected and flat. The children grew up, I showed them the footage and asked them to retell this story. Five-year-old Sarah told me a story with an unexpected ending. I realized that I needed to record her story and name the film after her. My son and daughter help me with my work. I ask them to draw something, and it’s always a different take on the composition, on the main characters. Based on these drawings, I come up with something new.

How did Three Love Stories come about?

S. F. : In a sense, they continue the theme started in Sarah’s Tale. How differently we all interpret reality. It was interesting to show Mayakovsky’s love story from different points of view. How Lilya Brik could tell, how he himself would tell, and how she is seen by someone from the outside. While I studied the materials, watched documentary footage of that time, the script changed. I didn’t want to talk more about a specific person, to get into the details of someone else’s life. A collective image of a poet who came from a mountain village to a big city appeared. The main thing left from the image of Mayakovsky is the ability to put tremendous power into love, such that not a single woman could be around for a long time. Little pieces of the chronicle, which suddenly broke off, I wanted to continue. And I drew a sequel. The result is such a strange film in which documentary footage is woven into animation. Animation already dictates other rules of the game, more conditional, and the chronicle begins to look completely different. It was very important to tell not an abstract love story, but to place it in a specific era. The graphics and painting of the early XNUMXth century artists helped. The film is based on quotes. It starts from childhood in Georgia. Of course, these are paintings by Pirosmani. Then the arrival in the city is a completely different schedule. Chagall, Tyshler, Chekrygin, Mansurov, Labas, Goncharova, Larionov. Seeing this work at the Krok festival, the French producer offered to come up with an application for the next film.

What did you present to him?

S. F. : I had a script about my dog’s life. I had to leave in the early 90s from my city. I left not knowing what to expect. And she left her dog at home. There she grew old and died without me. And I had a feeling of guilt. I began to think about this topic, drew a storyboard. The French producer liked the story, although it seemed too Russian. But everything worked out, and a few months later I left to shoot a film in France.

Your Brutus is perhaps the most poignant animation I’ve seen lately, also about a dog, about a loyal creature who unwittingly became a traitor. How was this film made?

S. F. : Accidentally bought the book «A Dog’s Life» by Ludwik Ashkenazy at a book fair. Read to children. «Brutus» and several other stories were in my head. And the comments on this book are memorable. Since 1934, prohibitions for Jews began in Germany. First, a ban on defending a dissertation, then a ban on Germans buying from Jews, then marriages with Jews, a ban on using libraries, renting hotel rooms, going to theaters and concerts, to skating rinks and swimming pools, and a ban on driving. Gradually, more and more were banned, and people, getting used to it, continued to live, not understanding how it could all end. I realized that I wanted to make a film based on the story «Brutus». It was interesting how you can turn this literature into a movie. The film «Brutus» has developed both easier and more difficult than others. When you apply for funding, you must specify the exact length of the film. But how to see in advance, to imagine the whole film? Everything is built on the image, details, pauses. How to calculate it? I started the stopwatch, closed my eyes, and started watching a movie that I hadn’t made yet. And strangely, I saw him. And then I started writing everything down. For a long time I remembered the details, the general feeling. We still had to look at the chronicle of the war years, photographs, films. Make hundreds of sketches. All of them hung in front of my eyes in the studio, so that the film was filled with people, so as not to forget anything. The animators Ekaterina Baikova and Svetlana Zimina helped me in my work. They took on some of this emotionally complex stuff. When I got to the darkest parts, I asked my daughter to draw the scenes. We needed a fresh look at what was so often shown to us in the movies. How prisoners sit on the train, who are being taken to the camp, how dogs and people in uniform meet them at night. And I have already made a detailed cartoon based on my daughter’s drawings. It was important to maintain lightness in the image, carelessness and deliberate dryness in presentation. Look for funny details.

What pushes for betrayal against loved ones? And where does the strength come from to endure it as steadfastly and humbly, as the heroine of Brutus, who turned out to be a victim, is going through?

S. F. : Sometimes betrayal happens gradually. You first allow something in your thoughts. Like Brutus, who kept thinking about the old horse. He was still quite an intelligent dog and lived in the family of a Latin philologist. And most of all he loved his mistress Little. But the thought of the smell of the blood of an old mare sat in his head. And Little at some point found herself in a situation of no choice. There was an order from the Nazis that the Jews should hand over the animals to the special detention center, and she took Brutus there, thereby also unwittingly betraying him. And at that moment, it seems to me, something in her soul died. It turns out that war changes us. The soul gets tired of resisting the absurdity of what is happening. Indifference makes it possible not to resist evil. Sometimes, in order to feel your strength, you need to resist, you need to find yourself in a hostile environment. But it often happens that evil routinely creeps into life. You don’t notice it or take it for something else. And it destroys the soul. A person first changes himself, trying to survive in an incomprehensible world with new concepts. And then everything becomes possible. This happened to Brutus, who is depicted in the story as a dog, but it is clear that we are talking about the human soul.

Why does animation help to make the invisible visible?

S. F. : Sometimes it seems to me that animation is too crude art. What is more subtle can be shown invisible in feature films, as did Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Herman, Muratova. There’s a lot you can decide just on a close-up. On the actor’s face. Try this in animation. Having reviewed the films of Caroline Leaf, Georges Schwitzgebel, Federic Buck, George Dunning or our masters, I understand that we ourselves set the limits. It’s all about the degree of freedom. It’s scary to do something that no one has done before. While working on the last film, I forbade myself to explain, to analyze what I was doing. I read from some poet: «I do not interfere in my work.» All right. For me, I need to keep this in mind. Animation is closest to poetry. The words of Seamus Heaney will fit her: “Until something flies into the poet’s ear, until his memory stumbles out of the blue, until surprise or excitement, however minimal, takes possession of him, the work will not go. After all, work is force multiplied by distance—when moving by inertia, work is zero. The form is not the blueprint of the poem, it is its final product. Form that becomes meaning is one of the most important features of animation.

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Can there be limitations in animation, where the artist and director create their own man-made world?

S. F. : You need to think about how to draw in motion everything that you came up with. And at the same time, remember that in a second of screen time, from 12 to 24 drawings will pass before your eyes. You can draw a very beautiful picture. Then you start thinking about how the characters will move in this picture, and you throw out everything superfluous. Each story requires not only a new solution for color, composition, camera movement, editing, and so on. In animation, how the character moves is important. If you review the films of Fyodor Khitruk, you can see that in each film he came up with a new style of movement. Since everything is possible in animation, it is difficult to achieve the degree of freedom that animation allows. Invent a world with new laws and play by these rules or break them too. Eduard Nazarov showed us the film «The Thieving Magpie» by Giulio Gianini and Emanuele Lusatti. The characters are simple translations, consisting of pieces of paper that were not even cut out with scissors, but torn with their hands, without attaching arms, legs, tails. The film begins, the game of imagination turns on when you predict how the newly born laws will work in this changed world. Everything is wrong, but in these moving pieces you find out the real truth of life. At this moment, you feel happy.